Arkansas Business

This story is from the archives of ArkansasSports360.com.

If Monday's luncheon address to the Little Rock Touchdown Club was an audition for the Arkansas State head football coaching job, should it open up this week, then Hugh Freeze passed with flying colors.

For a minute, we thought we were listening to Auburn offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn and his polished way with the media and the way he can inspire a crowd. That's probably not a coincidence: Freeze considers Malzahn one of his closest friends in the college coaching business and has known him since they both were coaching high school football.

Freeze is the offensive coordinator for Arkansas State. But he may best be known as Michael Oher's high school coach. Everyone became familiar with Oher, the current NFL offensive tackle and how he came out of the Memphis projects to become a college All-American at Ole Miss and a first-round draft pick, through the Hollywood movie "The Blind Side."

The names of the academy and Oher's coach were fictionalized in the film, per Hollywood's taking dramatic license. Don't compare the film version of Oher's coach with Freeze at all. Also, don't bother to think that Leanne Tuohy, Oher's adoptive mother, knew more football than the high school's coaching staff or that she offered play-call suggestions.

Freeze worked on Ed Orgeron's Ole Miss staff while Oher was a Rebel, and when Orgeron was dismissed in Oxford, Freeze took the head coaching job at Lambuth University in Tennessee in 2008, winning 21 games in two years. He was set to take his no-huddle spread attack (again, re: the Malzahn influence) to San Jose State as coordinator before Steve Roberts called him to implement the attack in Jonesboro. The call of the South, even after such a short time on the West Coast, pervaded the Freeze household with his wife and three daughters.

The results in Jonesboro were amazing, considering Freeze was implementing an entirely new scheme with an offensive line that had gone through an assortment of major injuries the year before. Also, the only quarterback he had in the spring was a freshman coming off knee surgery. Even the most experienced signal caller, rising sophomore Ryan Aplin, who had played in the last four games of 2009, would miss the spring with shoulder surgery. Completely new offensive schemes take time, and that means usually a full season, to take hold.

Yet, ASU set all kinds of offensive records in 2010, rising from 107th in the nation to the top 30, and gave the Red Wolves a chance in five games that they eventually lost in the last minute.

ASU was a handful of breaks from turning 4-8 into 9-2. Such is the misfortune that, repeated as it has been in Jonesboro, ends up costing veteran coaches their jobs. It might prove to be the case for Roberts, who has been ASU's coach for nine years but who has won at most only six games in a season.

Freeze didn't come back to Jonesboro to work one season. If ASU officials are smart, they will make sure Freeze is still coaching the Red Wolves next year. And they could do a lot worse than Freeze as the head coach, should Roberts be ousted Monday, based on what we saw of Freeze at the Touchdown Club.

He captivated the entire group with his "Make IT Happen," speech, the same one he's invited to give in Memphis once a year by the founder of Federal Express, Fred Smith. A person foremost must clearly define what "it" is, he says. That's what Freeze and the offensive staff did with the Red Wolves players this fall in becoming a force.

Your "it" and my "it" may be - and likely is - two different things, as Freeze described.

"It" is determined by attitude, he said. He referenced Harvard professor Daniel Goldman's studies that Intelligence Quotient (IQ) does not determine attitude, but rather listening and learning, the ability to focus under adversity and the ability to be kind.